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MacKenzie orders all her lattes with an extra shot of espresso. Her coffee she likes with plenty of sugar, but espresso prefers to leave bitter and while she likes flavored syrups and overly-frothy milk, she hates the way they dilute and over-sweeten the drink and so she always gets an extra shot—it was one of the first things about her that he committed to memory.
He’s standing at the front of the Starbucks across the street from the AWM building, shoving the stir-stick into the hole of plastic lid to stopper it up for his walk back to work, and then he’s on his back on the sidewalk, blinking up at the sky.
The way his ears are ringing and the fact that he’s lying on top of the shattered remnants of the window that was, only moments ago, in front of him leads Will to believe that he can make only one conclusion: there’s been an explosion.
The sky swirls into a supersaturated blur, and he closes his eyes.
He returns to consciousness to Mac’s voice warbling out a steady stream of curse words and instructions to someone who probably isn’t him. Or so he hopes, because his mind isn’t processing much of what she’s saying, and next he hears the crunch of a stiletto heel slicing over glass, and he tries to get off his back, he does, but none of his muscles will coordinate.
“Billy! Don’t move.”
Her hand splays over his chest, pinning him down.
“You’re kneeling on glass,” he says, pointedly ignoring how slurred his voice sounds to his own ears. And she is—on her knees in a pencil skirt, next to him, with a shadowy figure who might be Don or Jim or Neal hovering over her shoulder. “Mac, get up, you’re gonna—”
“Don’t move, Jesus Christ!” Her tone pitches higher, her fingers curling into the front of his shirt. “You could have a spinal injury, stop moving.”
Despite the pain, he has his eyes focus.
“How did you—Mac?”
The paramedics aren’t here yet, and neither are the police. But MacKenzie is here, looking perfectly in place among a backdrop of blown out windows and scorched wood paneling, relaying orders as she scoops all of her hair into her hands and ties it back into a ponytail. Arm shaking, he tries to reach up to touch her face, get her to look at him.
“MacKenzie?”
Her face hardens into an expression that he knows is one of barely-restrained fear. “Stop. Moving. Will, you have to—”
“Stop moving, yeah,” Will gasps. “I—fuck. It might not be safe here—”
“You think? We heard the explosion all the way on the twenty-second floor.” The hand not on his chest flutters through his hair, and he realizes belatedly that she’s checking him over for head wounds. He doesn’t know what she finds, though, because her hand comes to cradle his neck, holding their faces parallel to one another.
Her face slides back out of focus, and even as someone who prides himself on being able persevere through most levels of physical pain the gnawing pain in the base of his skull rockets straight through bothersome and manageable to sight-scattering and then to a level that torches his thoughts, turning them to fluttering ash.
“Honey? Just look at me. Stay awake.”
He squeezes his eyes shut, and opens them again. “I almost—she was napping when I got to the daycare. I was gonna bring Charlotte with me.”
“But you didn’t. She’s fine.”
“But I almost did.”
And she’s four months old this upcoming Monday and the bones of her skull haven’t fused together yet. Charlotte’s head is all soft fontanelle and unprotected brain matter, delicate skin that’s still pink and unblemished and Mac keeps softly telling him that their daughter is fine but somehow it’s not quite enough, the fact that he almost brought her here to injurious consequence is enough for Will’s breathing to hitch and splutter.
Mac’s thumb draws circles over the side of his neck, and his pulse jumps.
“Were there any threats?” he asks, squinting into the shadow of her form, moving his eyes away from the light. “For a bombing? Were there any—”
“Not that I know of.” She bites her lip. “No.”
Charlotte could have died because she’s unlucky enough to have a man who places a target on his back for a father.
He fights for it, fights for his mouth to reach his brain for a response, but his eyes’ decreasing abilities and the distinct feeling of his head trying to dislocate itself from his neck is too much, and he slides quickly and succinctly out of consciousness again.
The paramedic checks his pupils in the back of the ambulance.
“Is he on any medications?”
Mac’s engagement ring is cutting into the side of his hand where the diamond has flipped around on her finger. Her voice shaking more now that she thinks he’s not listening, she lists the names off the little orange bottles in their medicine cabinet. And it’s not like Mac doesn’t have little orange bottles of her own, but it’s that her prescriptions weren’t written at the end of therapy sessions talking about violent alcoholic fathers and their unstable emotionally-stunted children. Her prescriptions were written for days like this, days rattled by bomb blasts and gunfire and broken bodies; Mac doesn’t look at Charlotte knowing that she doesn’t deserve this.
“Does he have a prior history of concussion?”
Because Mac does deserve the life he’s been trying to give her and even though he tries to keep it from his mind, and most of the time actually succeeds, he sometimes finds himself looking at their baby wondering how his dad could do what he did to him. How, and why, and a lingering fifty-three years of logistics and totaling up how he could possibly deserve to be married to MacKenzie and have a daughter like Charlotte.
“He played football in high school and college and he—yeah. He does. But they were decades ago.”
If his neck wasn’t immobilized, he thinks he would try to give her an appreciative look for omitting the fact that he was a quarterback, so most of his past concussions were gifts from his dad. But he can’t move, and Mac sandwiches one of his hands between both of her own regardless of whether or not he can look at her, or form sentences.
“Is he allergic to any medications?”
It’s either his celebrity or massive health insurance policy or he took out or maybe the fact that he can’t stay awake for more than a few minutes, but the doctors waste no time getting him into a CT machine and even though the humming beast has only swallowed up his head Will is reminded of how much he does not like small spaces.
The reason for it is straight-forward and constant and painfully stereotypical and when he traded in wide open fields on Nebraska farms he made sure it was for a city apartment overlooking the river and now, the park, even if he no longer has his wall-to-wall windows and the terrace.
If someone is going to go around trying to blow him up, Will thinks, the doctors might as well just find him bleeding into his brain right now.
His arms are empty and his thoughts keep escaping through his mind like water through a sieve, but he cannot stop imagining Charlotte in his arms as the explosion began, being forced through the thick glass storefront, being crushed by him or the force of the blast and her short life coming to an end in the place where she’s supposed to be safest—against his chest.
Not that he can quite piece together a memory of what actually happened.
But that only makes it worse.
“Oh, Billy,” MacKenzie sighs, sitting by his head at the top of the gurney.
Ghosting her fingers over his forehead, she brushes his hair away from his face. Gaping and squinting, he struggles for breath—concussion confirmed, negative for any hemorrhage or hematoma but for reasons the ER doctor cannot discern for reasons beyond passing explanations of physical trauma, Mrs. McAvoy, it does things—
(To which, of course, Mac snaps back that she’s quite aware of what physical trauma does, thank you very much, to which he thinks he feels himself smile and if he could talk he’d correct them, that she’s Ms. McHale and not Mrs. McAvoy because that was never going to work.
Besides, the last Mrs. McAvoy that he knew was a very sad woman indeed, and Mac didn’t ask for his input when she wrote in Charlotte’s last name on the birth certificate paperwork before signing it, he just hopes that he doesn’t give either of them reason to loathe the name too.)
His blood pressure keeps plummeting.
Hands coated with cold sweat and face pale, he slips away again.
He wakes up in a room, not the trauma bay, in a hospital gown with an IV in his arm and nodes attached to monitors stuck to his chest. There’s a warm body sitting on the side of the mattress that he knows is MacKenzie, so he takes his time steadying himself, and opens his eyes.
Relief, or something like it, floods when he sees that Mac’s not paying him much attention at all.
There’s a bundle of soft blanket in her arms that he knows is the baby; the neckline of Mac’s shirt has been pulled down, and for a few seconds his vision sharpens into clear focus so he can watch Charlotte nurse at Mac’s breast.
“Leona brought her a little while ago. Said something about how the onsite daycare that she owns not being able to refuse her request to release a child to her, even if AWM doesn’t own ACN anymore.”
“How did you know that I was awake?”
Smirking with a maternal sort of quietness that seems to pervade most of her actions these days, Mac trails the backs of her fingers down Charlotte’s cheek. “I can always tell, honey.”
“I should probably be afraid, right?”
“Right.” She nods, taking one of his hands from his side and into her lap. “They’re keeping you overnight for observation. And the bomb—”
He winces.
“Did security find the threat? I’ll get a detail. Or we can all get—” It sounds absurd while still in his head, before he can even get it out of his mouth, but Will is rapidly favoring the idea of their four month old having a bodyguard of her own and Mac may know what to do when someone’s shooting at her but it couldn’t hurt for her to have one too.
Mac tugs at his hand. “It was a gas main explosion. Not a bomb. No one’s trying to kill you. Or, well, trying that hard to kill you.”
“What?”
Rapidly, he blinks.
“You and I just continue to have horrendous timing,” she mumbles, before fussing with the way that Charlotte’s feeding, and switching her to her other breast. Settling the infant against her, she looks at him again. “NYPD was by while you were being transferred to admitting.”
“It was a gas main?”
“Yeah.” Swallowing hard, Mac frowns as she wipes a tear from her eye before retaking his hand. “Not that it makes it much better. You did escape stitches, at least. There are a few burns we’re going to have to watch, though, and the doctors want you on IV fluids until your blood pressure stops dropping.”
“MacKenzie…”
“I’m fine, you ass. You’re the one who could have gotten killed.”
He huffs a pained laugh, concentrating enough to rub his thumb in circles over the knuckle of her index finger. “Yeah, that’s my point.”
“The life insurance policy vested,” she mutters, and rubs more tears from her eyes, before giving up and letting them track down her cheeks. Her gaze lands on the baby’s placid face before she looks at him again. “I love you, and you scared the shit out of me. Don’t do it again.”
An emotion that could be given the name shame puts pinpricks of color in his cheeks.
He lifts his hand to traverse the length of Charlotte’s little body, stopping to cup his palm over her head, just barely remembering what Charlie once said about getting hit by ice cream trucks.
The neurologist comes by a few hours later for another exam with the penlight and he really doesn’t want to do anything that doesn’t involve sleeping, but Mac’s pacing the hospital room, bouncing the baby on her shoulder with the same worried expression on her face, only now it’s amplified by her own exhaustion.
She nods as the doctor talks about traumatic brain injuries and comorbid hypotension and getting enough oxygen to the brain and the incidence of seizures, she starts nodding and keeps nodding, which is good because moving his head at all right now is a distinctly unattractive prospect. But Will does understand the gist of it, that his vitals are unimpressive and his blood pressure is troubling and the neurologist orders pressors.
He falls back asleep shortly thereafter.
There’s a weight on his chest. A familiar one that’s squirming slightly and snuffling softly, and he gets his sleep-leaden muscles to cooperate so that he can lift his hand to rest on Charlotte’s back, rubbing gentle circles over the soft onesie that she’s been changed into. Sighing, he smells the baby soap and laundry detergent, and wonders who gave her a bath or if Mac just got one of the staff to run to their apartment for an overnight bag.
“Mac?” he calls out, too tired to really open his eyes.
Another weight dips the mattress at the foot of his hospital bed. “She kept looking for you, so I just put her there. And then she fell asleep. It’s almost ten.” Her hand folds over the top of his; breathing deeply, he forces his eyes open. “Are you feeling any better?”
Stirring, Charlotte blinks her eyes open, a happy expression of hey, I know you , briefly illuminating her face before sleep grabs her again.
“Yeah,” he rasps, careful as he shifts into a more comfortable position and keeping Charlotte fast to his chest.
“She’s good for your vitals,” Mac whispers, smiling in a way that he can’t tell if she’s teasing or not.
“What?”
She starts to play with his hair again. “Your blood pressure’s been stable since I put her on you an hour ago. And she’s sleeping more soundly than she was on me. I do think she really does just like your heartbeat better than mine."
"You do get to feed her with your body. I have to have something," he retorts, because he does love to watch Mac breastfeed the baby but sometimes he likes to reassure himself that he's useful for more than just ferrying Charlotte back and forth from her crib and diaper changes.
Snorting, Mac's fingers seek out the birthmark on the back of Charlotte's neck, the one that they've debated whether it looks more like Missouri or a strawberry even though at anyone's last count, neither of them had presented winning arguments. "Either way," she says, "I’m fine with this arrangement.”
Frowning, he tries to piece the afternoon together again. “It was a gas explosion?”
MacKenzie hums. “It was.”
He nods, and grimaces when a bolt of pain shoots through his skull. “Not some wingnut trying to off me in a spectacular fashion?”
“Not today.” Her voice wavers, her fingers finding a spot on his face that he thinks must have some mark on it from the explosion, but hell if he hasn’t looked in a mirror lately to see what the damage is. Sniffling, she grins. “Pruitt was disappointed. You should have seen him. I think he wanted the headline. Freak accidents don’t sell like attempted murder.”
“I think I should get a bodyguard, regardless.”
Mac bites her lip. “That might be a good idea.”
“Later?” he asks, already beginning to fade. “I mean, we’ll talk about it—”
Softly, Mac presses a kiss to his cheek.
“Later.”
Later, which he realizes quickly to be morning, he awakes to a giggling baby lying in his lap. His lips forming into as wide a smile as his pounding headache will allow, he scoops her into his arms.
“Daddy loves you,” he murmurs, looking over the blonde top of their daughter’s head, briefly catching Mac’s eye where she sits again at the end of his bed.
Chattering in pleased burbling noises (that he’s been trying his hardest to commit to memory every day, even though Will suspects it won’t be happening today), Charlotte pats her hands over his face. He captures one of them so he can press a kiss to her palm, and cradles her against his chest.